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As my time in college comes to an end, I am struck by how much I haven’t learned. Sure, I’ve certainly learned a lot (I’d be wasting my time if I hadn’t), but as I prepare to leave UofL and the McConnell Center, I know that I have barely scratched the surface of the depths of knowledge and learning I have at my disposal. This isn’t all that surprising. After all, I can only take eight to twelve classes a year for four years for a maximum of 48 classes. UofL offers way more classes than that. Even if I limited myself to taking only classes I'm interested in and didn’t include required classes, there’s no way that I could fit all those classes into my schedule.
However, my limited schedule is not the only (or most limiting) reason why I haven’t been able to learn as much as I’d like. The real reason is that I, and every other person in the world, have what I call a “limited hard drive.” In a rough explanation (and with the qualification that I am not a neuroscientist), our brains store information kind of like a computer stores information in a hard drive. And just like a hard drive, our brains can only store so much information at a time. As a result, we limit the amount of information that we take in and we “delete” old or trivial information that isn’t very important to us. To get to the point, if there’s only so much information that a human can process, then they’ll only process the information that is important to them or seems worth their time.
The idea of our brains junctioning as limited hard drives is not a new one by any means. In fact, it’s closely related to the economic and logical concept of rational ignorance. Rational ignorance is, essentially, the idea that if the costs of learning something outweigh the benefits, then people will choose to invest little or no time in learning that thing. This phenomenon is true for everybody. In his book titled Democracy and Political Ignorance, law professor Ilya Somin explains, “Even the smartest and best-educated people have the time, energy, and mental capacity to assimilate only a tiny fraction of all the information potentially available to them.” We all have limited hard drives. No matter how much one reads or learns, there is always a limited amount of information that they can take in.
For someone who loves learning, this can be a disappointing reality. But I like to think of my limited hard drive as a reminder that there will always be new things to learn and that I should choose carefully the learning that I invest my time into. It’s a reminder that since I can’t learn everything, I shouldn’t really waste my time with junk. This doesn’t mean that I should turn my brain into some sort of utilitarian machine that only processes useful information. My brain is chock full of absolutely useless knowledge. But it does mean that I am careful (or try to be) with how I spend my time learning and with what I spend my time reading. When I’m reminded of my limited hard drive, I’m reminded to think about and learn about the things that really matter.
Will Randolph is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2022. He is studying history, Spanish, political science, and English literature at the University of Louisville.